I know everyone pretends that they love September, but it’s a month that creeps me out.
It signals the end of everything that’s fun.
My grandmother used to say about September, in Italian, that it is a month when flowers, leaves and old people die.
Grandma was a barrel of laughs.
As I said last year, I’m at that age where I misplace everything.
This year, somehow, I seem to have misplaced summer.
It was here a minute ago.
What happened? The days dwindled down to a precious few and as best as I can remember, Memorial Day was just a few hours ago.
Now Labor Day just ended the summer.
At my age I’m discovering my biggest enemy is not the clock, but the calendar.
THE ME TOO MOVEMENT JUST GOT SCREWED
This is my favorite story of the year.
It seems in 2013 a teenage actor named Jimmy Bennett went to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey, California, where he went to the room of a beautiful actress, Asia Argento. Bennett was 17 years old and Argento was 37.
According to the New York Times, Argento then gave Bennett alcohol and performed oral sex on him. Then she climbed on top of him and had intercourse with him.
After he left the hotel, Bennett says he began to feel “extremely confused, mortified, and disgusted.” He also says the trauma of the incident hampered his ability to work, and his income dropped significantly as a result.
Now let me interrupt the story to point out that once, many years ago, I too was 17 years old. I must also point out that every man reading this was once 17 years old.
I can’t speak for them, but let me tell you what I would have done if, when I was 17, a beautiful 37-year-old actress had done to me the same wonderful things that Ms. Argento did to Jimmy Bennett.
To begin with, the incident would have given me religion, something that I didn’t have when I was 17.
So first I would run to Our Lady of Grace Church on Avenue W in Brooklyn and I would knock on the door of the rectory and call for Father Cafero, who was the head priest of that church, and I would demand he hear my confession.
“Father Cafero,” I would say, “wait until you hear what just happened to me. It was wonderful … You’re going to love this. This is not one of those dreary confessions you usually have to listen to.”
Then I would light 20 candles in the church to thank God for allowing all these wonderful things to happen to me. Then on the way home I would stop total strangers and tell them, “Excuse me, do you have a minute?” Then I would tell them the story about this beautiful actress who was 37 who did these wonderful things to me, and I would describe all the wonderful things in great detail.
I would tell this story to everyone but my parents.
Italian boys don’t talk about sex to their parents until their parents are over 90 years old and totally deaf.
Now you know what I would have done, but let me tell you what that little sneak Jimmy Bennett did.
Five years after he got over feeling “extremely confused, mortified, and disgusted,” he threatened to MeToo Asa Argento for seducing a minor and managed to get her to quietly pay him $380,000 or he would tell the world what happened.
The New York Times got all the information about this shakedown, including a selfie dated May 9, 2013, of Argento and Bennett lying in bed. I saw the picture and Bennett didn’t look extremely confused, mortified, and disgusted. He looked quite happy, perhaps a little tired.
In the end, the biggest loser in this case was the MeToo movement, because Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie biz to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault.
If this hurts Argento’s word and helps a bad guy like Weinstein beat his rap, I say Jimmy Bennett should be hung by his er … er … er … you know, what are described in polite company as his private parts.
That should leave him feeling extremely confused, mortified, and disgusted for the rest of his wretched life.
JUSTICE FOR THE HAIR NET LADIES
There’s something wrong about that story of those two sisters, Joanne Pascarelli and Marie Wilson, who allegedly stole a half a million bucks worth of high school lunch money.
First of all, if they were real school lunchroom workers, why weren’t they wearing hair nets in their pictures?
I’ve never seen a school lunchroom lady who didn’t wear a hair net, and I’ve been led to believe that those nets were permanent and they are never removed by school lunch ladies, even when sleeping or having sex.
Plus, are they kidding about a half a million bucks worth of school lunch food?
In the history of school lunches, going back to the 1930s, there hasn’t been half a million total dollars spent on food for school lunches.
Want to know how much half a million dollars adds up to in school lunch food? Imagine a mountain of five billion 3-slice bologna sandwiches.
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